Except when that struggle and its many facets play out in a historical novel called All Other Nights, the tale of 19-year-old Rappaport and American Jews, north and south, during the Civil War.

Who knew that Philadelphia was a hub of espionage in those days, or that American Jews, like Philadelphians in general, were divided over slavery and the war, said Rabbi Lance Sussman of Reform Congregation Keneseth Israel in Elkins Park.

Author Dara Horn knew.

Her novel All Other Nights (Norton, $24.95) explores the role of American Jews, the good and the bad, in the Civil War. The book is this year's selection for "One Book One Jewish Community," which begins Sunday night at 7 with the author signing books at Tiferet Bet Israel, 1920 Skippack Pike, Blue Bell.

Sussman, an expert on Jews in the Civil War, will discuss the book in November at the Kaiserman Jewish Community Center in Wynnewood. (A schedule of events is available at www.jewishphilly.org/onebook.)

This is the third year for the program, a project of the Jewish Federation of Greater Philadelphia in cooperation with the Auerbach Central Agency for Jewish Education and Jewish Outreach Partnership.

The program takes the community "back to being the people of the book," said Rabbi Philip Warmflash, the outreach partnership's executive director. "The idea was to create Jewish conversations in the community and really to expand Jewish learning," he said.

The first year, those conversations were on Aaron Lansky's Outwitting History, a true story about a small group of people who set themselves the mission of saving Yiddish books nationwide.

Last year's choice was My Father's Paradise by Ariel Sabar, a memoir that traces the author's roots in Kurdish Iraq's Jewish community.

"We were looking for a different genre this year, for a different place to focus on in Jewish time and space," said Debbie Leon, the program's director.

The novel's geography stretches from New York to New Orleans, with stops in Mississippi and Philadelphia, where Rappaport starts on his process of redemption after a series of disastrous choices, and where spies and financiers for the North and South huddle.

"In Philadelphia you have a city that's Northern, but physically quite close to the border," Horn said in a telephone interview. "It was in the Union, but it was an entry point for Southern spies and for money and information to exchange hands.

"There was a fair amount of intrigue going on in Philadelphia," she said.

Her book features one real-life Jewish figure from that era - Judah P. Benjamin. The first unconverted Jew to serve in the U.S. Senate, he was a close adviser to Jefferson Davis and served in the Confederacy's cabinet. In the book, Benjamin is powerful and mysterious, a loyal Jew and devout rebel.

About 10,000 Jews served in the Northern or Southern armies, Sussman said, with 7,000 of them wearing a Union uniform. The number of Jews from the Philadelphia area who served is unclear, he said.

Horn also describes a little-known Civil War episode in which Gen. Ulysses S. Grant ordered the expulsion of all Jews from Tennessee, Kentucky, and Mississippi, territory the North controlled.

Horn fills in the historical framework with the fictitious main character's journey of self-discovery.

Jacob Rappaport flees his upper-crust Jewish family home in New York's Madison Square, circa 1861, after his father promises him in marriage to a friend's daughter.

On the night before his wedding, Jacob joins the Union Army.

From that moment on, Horn weaves together Jewish involvement in the war, anti-Semitism within the Union Army, competing allegiances to country and religion, and the push and pull of Jewish families and communities during the war.

Rappaport's superiors want him to use his religion to get close to Southern Jews who support the Confederacy - asking him to murder his own uncle, suspected of plotting to kill President Abraham Lincoln.

The young man is morally torn, but agrees.

"The reason he is able to take on that mission is because he's avoiding any idea of who he is himself," said Horn, 32, who lives in northern New Jersey.

The book's central theme, she said, is the possibility of change. Rappaport does change his priorities and decisions. The resulting lesson gives a broader meaning to the title, which is a phrase used at the Passover seder to describe how the first night of the holiday is different from other times.

"Freedom requires the imagination to realize tonight doesn't have to be the same as the night before," Horn said. "People can change."

All Other Nights is Horn's third novel and her first to be chosen for a community book project in a large city.

Horn hopes that participants in One Book discussions and other activities, which end in March, come away with a better sense of how American life and Jewish life complement each other.

Warmflash hopes the program will turn out to be a teaching moment on the role Jews played in the Civil War, and will deepen the connections among all parts of the Jewish community - young and old, orthodox, conservative, and reform.

"This is a way to engage people who have never been engaged before," he said.